Bill Claybrook, of Aberdeen Group, has written a new report. It's called "SCO-IBM Lawsuit: Time for Some Changes?" and you can get it here. It's free, but you must register.

According to a news report on NewsFactor, he says he just can't say for sure if the code he saw proves infringement or not. Unlike Ms. Didio, who if I remember correctly studied French in college, Mr. Claybrook used to be a UNIX kernel programmer, also a university professor. While Ms. Didio was endlessly impressed, she says, by the code, Mr. Claybrook said just "eyeballing the code" didn't provide enough evidence to be conclusive, because they didn't show it to him on a computer.

"I wasn't able to look at the files on the computer, so, all I can say is, 'I saw this stuff, and I don't know whether it's true or not.'

"'All of it could have been copied from BSD Unix,' he said, referring to a version of Unix different from SCO's System V version. 'I have no way of knowing all that -- not without seeing it on the computer,' he said. 'And what's weird about it is, it wasn't like they copied the whole function,' Claybrook said, referring to the programmers who allegedly copied code. 'If you pull pieces of code from one program to another, it means you have to integrate them into your code, and then test with everything else,' he said. 'It just doesn't make sense -- why not take the whole function?'"

Bottom line? "In Aberdeen's view, if SCO wins its lawsuit against IBM (or settles out of court), then this is not a knockout punch for Linux," Claybrook wrote.